The night before D-Day
I spent the entire day cleaning and organizing the house, trying to put it back together after about 4 months of continuous construction projects centered around finishing the basement. Think that all in all there was about 20 pounds of drywall dust collected on random articles around the place. But, we are almost finished and can sit down for a bit and reflect on the night before The Plan “starts.”
I say starts with quotations, because we’ve hit a slight bump in the road leading into day one. I met with Christopher (coach) on Friday and we did a putter fitting and found one that seems to be a good fit so ordered it. Now, it will be about a week before we get the putter in and Chris is making that last minute trip to Augusta for a few days to watch the Masters. The day he gets back has to attend an annual speed golfing tournament down in Bandon Doons, Oregon. So, seeing as he will be gone for the week and I don’t exactly have a club yet, we are kind of delaying the true D-Day of the plan until next week.
In the meantime, I am going to go out to the course, as planned, by myself tomorrow morning and putt around with an old club that I found. Christopher doesn’t think it will hurt me too much if I get a little bit of practice in before we meet up and officially learn to putt, but he also doesn’t want me to do too much because, basically, I don’t know what I’m doing and he will not be able to be there to tell me whether I’m learning a bad or good trait.
Outside of that, this week will be spent finishing the house and getting mentally ready for The Plan to really start. It has been about a year in the making, so one more week won’t kill anyone even if I was super jazzed for the set D-Day. And, honestly, after just finishing work and construction and getting over a cold and moving downstairs, I could use a day or two off before I begin the physical pursuit.
In the other worlds, I am meeting with Donn (strength trainer) tomorrow to get an assessment of where I am when entering The Plan. Think he will be able to give me some things to work on to help prevent me from getting a sore back after doing days and days of putting. It seems easy, but you do have to lean over quite a bit to putt and after about four hours of that in a row, it could be pretty easy to strain something or just get overly sore, so if we can build up the core we can avoid any possible down time due to lower back stress. Hopefully.
Got an email from Dr. Len Hill today too. Had not heard from him in a bit, but he was encouraging about the start. Said:
“Dan, I wish you the best in this. It’s a really interesting project and one that could pay real dividends in understanding the process of expert performance, and if you make the tour, there are no broke PGATour golfers (if they don’t make regular visits to Las Vegas).”
He is a very nice person and I’m glad to have his expertise in the corner going into this project.
Ok, off to email some more people and buy a putting aid that Christopher suggested.